The desire to procreate came mostly from my husband. He was that clucky bloke at barbecues who would rub pregnant bellies, play wrestles with the little kids and long to play football with his own bunch of mini-humans until he was old and senile.

We both agreed three children over the next few years would do our country proud, and began trying to fall with ignorant earnest. Much to his joy and dismay, falling pregnant wasn’t as easy a process as we were led to believe. But after twelve months of practising the birds and the bees, plus plenty of failed pregnancy tests, hey presto! We had made life! What an unexpected feeling it is to know that your body has finally met all the synchronised chance events that would allow one fertilised egg meet one in 40million sperm in a perfectly precise moment, and then miraculously join and divide into two tiny cells, and so on and so forth.

It had me at, “Hello, you’re pregnant!”

However, the simple journey into parenthood, as taken by billions of others throughout history on this planet, would be slightly more ‘challenging’ for this happy couple. Well, here’s a heads up, be careful what you brood about. It seems the Universe has a sense of humour after all. A realisation I encountered at our first ultrasound when the obstetrician calmly noted, “Yes, I can see three heartbeats there, I’ll just double check if there are any more.”

Me: WHAT? Wait! What do you mean ‘any more’?

Yes, I ignorantly believed just one baby was the quota at a time, where the f#*k does the number three even fit into the fathomable picture of a pregnancy!! I did say I wanted three children, but not all at once!

My husband on the other hand was jumping around with an unrestrained exuberance similar to that of a goose smoking crack and letting out silent, joyous hallelujahs (personally, I think he must have been drunk or in shock).

All I could do after a stunned moment of silence was give a pathetic laugh that sounded more like a ‘holy shit’ laugh rather than a ‘woohoo’ laugh. All I kept thinking was, “Come on Kate, process this information calmly,” but my brain went into a spat attack of firing a million questions at itself in the hope I had some answers in the depths of all that grey matter somewhere.

I had nothing.

How do you even have triplets? How do you give birth to three babies at once? How do you feed three babies? How do you hold them all? And of course, the persistent voice in my head that kept saying over and over and over again, “Geez woman, you’re going to be bigger than a house!”

Luckily for me, my kind Slovenian obstetrician, with her large womanly frame and wild curly brown hair, looked calmly up from the screen and directly into my eyes and said, “So, you’re going to have triplets girl, okay?”

“Okay,” was all I could quietly mutter under her determined gaze. But a quick glance down at my lovely flat, tanned tummy covered in ultrasound jelly-goo, I knew my boring, self assuming, ordinary life was never going to be the same ever again. Either was that tummy. Or my boobs for that matter. For the next 15 minutes my obstetrician jibbered on about all sorts of things that were probably very important, but still to this day I cannot recall a thing.

As we left her office, my husband was still happily jumping around like a freaking lunatic, and a large part of me just wanted to punch him in the face while screaming, “What have you done to me, you bastard! Stop being so god damn excited. Don’t you know I’m going to be a size of a front-end loader! This is all your stupid fault you crazy man! Who the hell has triplets, you’ve made me into a freak show!!”

But of course I didn’t. I smiled. Told myself I was just in shock and calmly got into the car and tried to block out his annoying smirk that was secretly already boasting to the boys how he, ‘The Sperminator 3000′, had enough firepower to fertilise an army.

No sex for him for a month! Or ever! But our journey had only just begun…

To find out how I survived, check out my blog posts below: Triplet Tales